Clean Tea

I recently weaned myself off coffee. My daily intake levels were well above normal levels, as was my tolerance. The only thing it was doing for me was preventing me from getting a good night’s sleep. So I decided to quit. I spent two weeks cutting back, and then went cold turkey over the Labour Day weekend.

I’m now sleeping much better, and no longer need that morning jolt to get me going.

However, I was not willing to give up the pleasure of a hot beverage in the morning, so I’ve developed an interest in the world of herbal teas. And what a world it is. David’s Tea® has more than 150 varieties; Tealish® has more than 200. Where does one begin? Obviously, this is a serious Big Data problem we’re dealing with here.

I put my developer skills to work and scraped the Davids Tea® website.

There are many caffeine-free teas available, but when I started looking at them I realised that many of them contain sweeteners and flavours (both artificial and “natural”). Caramel Corn for example has more than 20 ingredients including sugar, glucose syrup, sorbitol, mono and diglycerides. It has so many ingredients that they don’t all fit on the page.

Davids Tea® by the numbers:

152 teas (excluding kits and samplers)

106 contain sugar and/or flavourings

52 caffeine-free

So I filtered the list to only show teas with

No caffeine

No sugar

No stevia

No flavourings

Only 5 teas on the Davids Tea® menu pass my filter are what I would consider to be “clean”. The blessed few are